By
Leon Fenster
Letter from Beijing
February 10, 2016 11:36As Beijing convulses to the sound of a million firecrackers celebrating the Chinese New Year, look hard enough and you will find a sizable group of Jews eating traditional dumplings with their Shabbat chicken soup and singing the Kabbalat Shabbat facing a Ming-esque Chinese cabinet which serves as the ark for their scrolls.
In the story of Jewish wandering — that perennial saga of building new communities in distant lands — China feels like the latest frontier. Here we are building a Jewish community where none existed before, within another ancient culture that has had almost no historical contact with our own.
There are, of course, well-known exceptions to this absence of contact, such as Kaifeng and Harbin’s small Chinese-Jewish communities. But they are far from China’s metropolises.
The Second World War prompted another crossing of paths when Shanghai became a refuge for thousands of Jews fleeing persecution. But as soon as the whiff of Communist revolution arrived, the community scattered.
Today’s Jews in China are a minority within a minority: Jews are a sliver of the expat community whose numbers in China are, in turn, a drop in the ocean. Building a community in such a culturally alien place can feel daunting.
Certainly, there are unusual challenges. Few Jews were born here. Most are passing through on one-year, five-year or ten-year stints. This transience makes it hard to predict what the community will look like in five years’ time.
But for now it is flourishing. The capital’s broad-tent synagogue, Kehillat Beijing, was established 37 years ago by three prominent businesswomen. Beijing has gained a Moishe House, Chabad houses, a Jewish school, a Jewish film festival and an annual Limmud China, which brings together Jews from across Asia.
The newness of Jewish life here means that every event, wedding, or festival feels groundbreaking. Small numbers of Jewish families are laying down roots and thinking ahead towards this future. New trilingual (Chinese-Hebrew-English) Jewish books are in the works.
For me, life in Beijing certainly does not lack Jewish fulfilment. Instead it fulfils an ideal vision of exilic, diaspora Judaism. Ours is an identity designed for wandering to new places and creating Jewish life where none existed before. In China we have a sense of arriving in a new place and building Jewish life from the bottom up. We are building a village — a shtetl, if you will — within the megacity.
Leon Fenster is chair of Limmud China, an artist and architectural designer
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